in the end my thoughts on this are that not everything is a stack, and not everything is an untyped list of things. (uh, wow, really?)

Modifying Lisp code is hard. (not according to my experience. to the contrary, in fact)

Trying to understand how things are passed along is hard because the passed lists are not annotated. (so don't pass lists, nobody's forcing anybody)

Adding new material to pass along to another routine is hard. (what color is the sky in your world, mister?)

at first I thought "why bother?". in fact, as a rule I don't, since it is my belief that trying to "convert" people to whatever (or even just educate them a little about whatever) is akin to teaching those who don't want to learn — very annoying (to both parties, to be sure) and utterly pointless.

but then I felt a flash of empathy. to my mind, there is not a lot of things more destructive than being ignored after saying something stupid. it can leave one thinking he's right when he's not. it can distort one's worldview with frightening and quiet effectiveness. it's a sin to casually let it happen to people.